Final Post

Through taking this class I have learned many valuable ways to use technology in the classroom.  It is important for teachers to stay up to date on the latest technologies because these are what the future generations will be using to work with and learn with.  I loved the web quests and thought that they were a great tool because there are so many out there on every subject.  It is also very easy to create your own for a lesson.  I am also glad that I learned about Google Docs.  They are easy to use and parents, students, and teachers can all access them and have their own personal copy.  The forms were my favorite, but all of the docs made it easy to communicate to parents what the class is doing/working on.  Blogs would also be a great resource for this.  As a teacher i think it would be great to have a blog and let the kids contribute to it at home and the parents and other teachers could look at it to keep track of what lessons we are using and projects we are working on.  I probably would not use Twitter in the classroom just because it is so limited. I would much rather have the kids set up their own personalized blog where they could write as much as they wanted and still subscribe to other people's posts.  I think that I am much more open and comfortable with using technology in the classroom now than I was before taking this class.  I have been given a lot of good ideas on how to use the it with kids.  And because I understand it, it is much easier to teach the kids and come up with ideas on how to use it.

Google Earth

I thought that Google Earth was very user-friendly.  it was so easy to use and there were a lot of helpful links that you were directed to for more information on sites around the world.  This would be a great resource to use for a geography lesson and kids could find different landforms.  Or a geology lesson about different volcanoes, rivers, mountain ranges, etc.  It would also be fun to look at locations that are mentioned in class readings so that the kids could see the region that the characters are describing.